Comment on Lemmy instances that are focused on mirroring Reddit content?

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Spzi@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

It’s free software, I am not going to pretend that I have any power to prevent abuse from motivated actors or if someone tries to weaponize it.

Ok, so your previous assurances were completely unfounded. Maybe even worse, your reluctance to see how your tool could be misused gives little hope you would take steps to prevent that.

all the bots are in the same instance which makes it very easy to be defederated.

It’s still an action thousands of people need to take just to undo the harm of one bot, or one instance. And some will not know how to, and leave Lemmy instead, which is exactly the opposite from your intent. Please run these bots in instances which are not federating their content to the fediverse. Make the newsletter opt-in. Don’t force people to opt-out. Even more so since for each user who might enjoy that service, many more will suffer from it.

Also, since you just clarified it’s free software and you have no power to prevent abuse, “all the bots are in the same instance” is nothing but a hope. From my point of view, it does not matter so much anyways. More spam bots / spam instances are added to the network, which is bad.

But there are deterrents, mainly (a) the fact that accessing Reddit’s API has a cost for those trying to do high-volume of requests

Since we already have a solid problem with spam bots, this does not seem to deter effectively. It’s strange but apparently it’s what people do with these bots.

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